The Old Blog Archive, 2005-2009

Archive for October, 2008

[ANN] InputMethodKit Backporting Component for OS X 10.4 Tiger

InputMethodKit Backporting Component, or IMK-Tiger for short, helps
input method developers backport their IMK-based input method apps to
OS X 10.4 Tiger. It is what we use to backport the latest OpenVanilla,
a popular input method toolset in Taiwan, to 10.4.

I’ve posted more details on Cocoa-dev.

Some Updates

Going to be a really short update.

Now you know that I work for (and actually own) Lithoglyph, and we’ve just released a new version of Mondrianum, a color picker plug-in that leverages Adobe kuler color theme resources. And this being a few things that we are working on.

At the same time we’re still thinking hard and moving at a slow pace on giving TapExpense an upgrade. We’ve learned a lot three months after the App Store went live, and we are working on putting them in practice. Redesigning, reforming or simply refactoring an existing app is hard, as it turns out. But we are not yielding to the difficulties any time soon.

I really want to apologize for my slowness at doing anything related to mobilesync-inspect. I believe there are (or should be, but I didn’t do research) other tools that perform somewhat same tasks, hopefully with better UI. I really don’t have time to do all the testing and try out the replace-and-restoration scenario myself.

Apparently mobilesync-inspect belongs to some of the worst kinds of the open source software, that it can’t attract enough developer interest to carry on its development, plus that the original developer (that’s me) simply doesn’t have the resource (time, energy, committment) to improve it further…

ObjectiveFlickr, on the other hand, seems to fare better. There are lively discussions on how to port OF to iPhone–cutting off the NSXMLDocument dependency that is. And I’m glad that there are people interested and enthusiastic enough to do it. My own take would be scrapping XML parsing using NS stack entirely and use libxml2 to render Flickr’s XML response block a simple dictionary. But again that takes some time to re-do a few things.

OpenVanilla is under some major overhaul. Zonble and I are working on a nearly rewritten version of the OS X loader, this time entirely based on InputMethodKit. One interesting challenge is to backport IMK-based loader to Tiger, as it turns out that the market we want to support (Taiwan mainly) still has 50%-55% users hanging on with their Tiger installations. And we actually have found a solution for that, first applied in some in-house projects that we have at our company. The solution will be released as an open source library shortly.